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Work Minister Esther McVey hailed different figures, showing the overall number of people out of work – not simply claiming benefits – is still falling sharply.

That total fell by 8,000 across Yorkshire to 240,000, part of a UK-wide reduction of 125,000 to 2.34m in the three months to December.

However, those statistics are less recent than the claimant count for the West Yorkshire districts, which is for January.

Councillor Susan Hinchcliffe, the executive member for employment and skills at Bradford Council, said the City Growth Zone incentive was having a positive impact with businesses.

But she said the Government had to start engineering an economic recovery for the whole country, “not one which is just propped up on the overheating London and South East economic bubble”.

Nick Palmer, senior labour market statistician at the Office for National Statistics, said there remained an overall falling trend despite the latest figure comparing the July-September and October-December three-month periods, which at 7.2 per cent was slightly higher than last month’s published figure of 7.1 per cent for September-November. “The main conclusion that should be drawn from these latest figures is that the rate at which unemployment has been falling is likely to have slowed down,” he said.